Chapter 728: Political Price

On the balcony of Jason’s treehouse, Vidal Ladiv was looking warily at the spherical device at the end of the pole he was holding.

“What exactly is this thing?” he asked.

“Don’t worry about it,” Travis said distractedly as he rummaged through a large box, absently tossing out crystals. “Just don’t let it get too close to you. I’ve almost certainly resolved the organic proximity combustion issue, but better safe than sorry.”

“What?”

Before Vidal could ask more questions, a portal arch appeared on the balcony. Jason and his companions emerged, with Farrah immediately looking at the spherical device.

“How did you resolve the organic proximity combustion issue?” she asked Travis.

“I put it on the end of a pole,” he said.

"Oh," she said, and then turned to look at Vidal with a sympathetic grimace.

“Don’t let it get too close to you,” she suggested.

“Travis,” Jason said, “take that thing off him. Vidal, I assume you’re here because the Adventure Society has decided how to punish us because we wouldn’t let them steal all our prisoners.”

Travis waved a rod in the direction of an open door. A construct creature that looked like a naked store mannequin walked out and over to Vidal with a rocking shamble. The construct looked like it had been hastily assembled, possibly while drunk, from whatever parts came to hand. Vidal was fairly sure the left forearm was a short length of tree branch sloppily painted off-white.

“What’s this for?” Vidal asked, clutching the very end of the pole to keep the device as far from himself as possible.

“Just hand it the thing,” Travis said.

“You said this device was dangerous, and that construct does not look stable.”

“It’s fine,” Travis said unconvincingly. “Hardly any explosives are left on it. After the incident.”

“What incident?”

“I don’t think he’s allowed to tell you,” Farrah said. “I don’t remember the exact terms of the legal agreement, but the gag order lasted at least until the healers figured out how to stop… I shouldn’t say any more.”

“I don’t think he’s got any confidence in your construct, Travis,” Neil said. “Can’t you just take it yourself?”

“I’m not going near that thing,” Travis said. “And you should be grateful I’m not. You’re the one who would have to figure out how to get healing magic to work through the interference.”

“What interference?” Neil asked.

“The magic on my nethers if there’s another testicular resonance event.”

“Another WHAT?” Vidal asked as he tossed the pole and the device it was attached to over the balcony.

“Hey!” Travis said. “I was joking; it’s perfectly safe.”

The device hit the ground and exploded. Everyone turned to look at Travis.

“Okay, ‘perfectly’ may have been a slight exaggeration,” Travis conceded.

Humphrey went to the rail and looked over.

“I don’t think it’s going to start a forest fire,” he said.

"Of course it won't," Travis said. "It's way too wet here for that. Probably. I might just pop down there and spray some stuff to make sure."

He ducked through the door the construct had emerged from and came out with a red canister.

“Blue,” Farrah said.

Travis looked down at the canister made a wincing expression and went back inside, emerging with a blue canister instead.

“Dodged a bullet there,” he said and made his way over to an elevating platform. Fitting in with the motif of the treehouse, the platform looked like it was being lowered on ropes.

"It's fine," Travis called up from below. "It's all fine. There are no problems down—"

One of the construct's arms popped off and went sailing over the rail with the thrum of a spring being violently unsprung.

"It's fine," Travis called up again. "On an unrelated note, Farrah could you wash down the construct from the green canister? Nothing dangerous is happening down here, but very very quickly would be ideal."

Everyone moved away from the construct that was now swaying on its feet.

“Isn’t this the person who built the bomb that felled the Builder’s flying city?” Vidal asked.

“Oh, yes,” Farrah said as she went into the room, then came out with a third canister, this one green. “He’s very good at making things that explode. Or shoot dangerous energy more or less on command. Emit poisonous gas, often on purpose. Liquefy… oh, not allowed to talk about that one either. You know, Princess Liara knows a number of excellent legal advocates."

She used her Obsidian Wall power to put up a wall of dark stone between the group and the construct, now making a fizzing sound as it turned lopsidedly on the spot. With their vision of it blocked, they watched Farrah spray white liquid from the canister into the space they couldn’t see behind the wall.

“I’m not doubting his ability to cause destruction,” Vidal said. “My concerns are more about stability. The bomb that took down the fortress city, he presumably built that in the city where I was living at the time. Where my mum and hundreds of thousands of other people were living, right?”

“It was a fun project,” Travis called out from below. “It was interesting to… why is this thing turning the plants that colour?”

“Is this something I should be allowing to happen in my building?” Jason asked.

“It’s fine,” Farrah said, moving to put the wall between herself and the construct as dark, thick smoke started to rise from it.

“Why is there a skull drawn on the side of that canister?” Belinda asked.

“No idea,” Farrah said as a hole corroded through the wall. She raised another one in front of it.

“We might have used a few experimental materials on the construct,” she confessed. “Just trying to find things that can hold more magic than usual without dangerous resonance.”

“Some might say that trapping an escalating magical energy inside a fixed matrix with no release mechanism is dangerous…” Travis called out from below.

Everyone waited in silence for him to continue until finally, Jason spoke up.

“…but,” he prompted.

“But what?” Travis called back. “Why did everyone go quiet?”

"We were kind of expecting you to follow up on that last thing you said," Jason told him.

“No, I was done.”

"Should we move to a different tree house?" Sophie suggested and they all swiftly moved across a rope bridge to a different house built around another tree. Like all the treehouses that made up Jason's disguised cloud palace, it had a broad balcony. Jason called up a set of cloud-substance furniture for everyone that masked itself as wood to match the house. Despite the appearance, it retained the luxurious softness of cloud material. They all took their seats which had Jason and his companions all facing the single chair left for Vidal.

“Should we wait for Travis?” Humphrey asked.

“No,” Travis called out. “Also, Farrah, could you bring me the yellow and purple canisters.”

“I thought you couldn’t get the yellow anymore after what happened to the bottling plant,” Farrah called back.

“He said I could take the surviving stock so long as I promised to never come back.”

“Just go,” Jason told her.

She wandered off and Jason turned to Vidal.

“So,” he said. “What has the Adventure Society decided to do about us?”

“To wait,” Vidal said. “There are opinions ranging from revoking your membership to demoting you all to one star. The director has spoken up for you, but he couldn’t override the entire executive council. The most he could manage was to refer it to the Continental Council. They will send an assessment officer to make a final judgement.”

“How long will that take?” Rufus asked.

“I have no idea,” Vidal said. “My guess would be a while, as this smacks of politics and the Continental Council really doesn’t like that. Honestly, I suspect that the executive council in Yaresh made sure it came across as political to slow down the process.”

“Why would they stall like that?” Sophie asked. “I assume it’s so they can bend us over somehow.”

“The expedition,” Jason said. “They need us for that. But they want us to toe the line, so they’re letting us know that there’s disciplinary action waiting for us afterwards. They hope that will put us on our best behaviour and make us more compliant.”

“They clearly haven’t been paying attention,” Belinda said. “We’re not exactly a compliant kind of team.”

“No team is,” Humphrey said. “Not any of the good ones, anyway. Adventurers have to be independent thinkers, able to take responsibility for their own choices.”

“Agreed,” Rufus said. “Any good Adventure Society branch respects that. It’s when politics get involved that it goes wrong. I might not think much of the way they train adventurers in Rimaros, but their Adventure Society strikes the right balance between directing adventurers and trusting them.”

“You look nervous, Vidal,” Jason said. “Unhappy.”

“I’m an Adventure Society official,” he said. “It doesn’t sound like you intend to make my life any easier.”

“Don’t forget what being an adventurer is about,” Rufus told him. “It’s not about the society and it’s not about us. It’s about helping people. Protecting people.”

“I don’t think you all being at odds with the Adventure Society will help a lot of people,” Vidal pointed out.

“And I think that excuses like that are how people who have corrupted the Adventure Society’s purpose get good adventurers to go along with bad intentions,” Rufus shot back. “All that accomplishes is getting people to stay quiet while the poison spreads.”

“Let’s not pile it all on Vidal, here,” Jason said. “He’s just the guy stuck in the middle, telling both sides things they don’t want to hear. That must suck. He’s not a local and is just as new to the political situation here as we are. Plus, he doesn’t have the same leverage we do to tell people to sod off.”

“Thank you,” Vidal said. “I had concerns about what I would be caught up in when the society assigned me to you as a liaison, but it has been more trying than anything I imagined. But I have a duty, and part of that duty is to give the society my best assessment of what you will do next.”

“For now,” Jason said, “we’re going to do what we were doing already: continue the contracts we signed up for.”

“Because it’s about the people who need help,” Rufus reiterated. “They don’t care about the politics. They only care about the monsters threatening their homes and families.”

"And we're going to help them," Humphrey said.

“Out of curiosity,” Rufus asked, “how resistant were the people calling for our heads to bringing in the Continental Council?”

“The Aristocratic Faction is a political bloc that crosses all major institutions in Yaresh,” Vidal explained. “They have members in any area prestigious enough and influence any place that isn’t. This is hardly unusual as aristocratic families hold a firm grip on most cities. There are other political factions, of course, but my experience has been that most places have only two main groups with any real influence. One is a conservative faction, usually led by aristocrats and others with wealth and power whose interests begin and end with maintaining the advantages they’ve built up over generations. The other group is also usually made up of aristocrats and people with power and money. This group believes in making changes and doing what’s right. They also believe that they are the only ones who know what’s right, so they make sure the changes are all either made by them or by those they control. Also, what’s right never seems to involve them giving up any of their money and power, oddly enough.”

“That sounds uncomfortably familiar,” Jason muttered.

“And we come from another universe, bro.”

“Those two power blocs, or some variation of them,” Vidal said, “exist in every state and city-state that I have had dealings with as an Adventure Society official. Where those political blocs exert a significant influence on the Adventure Society, that is where they start to lose track of that mission Mr Remore was talking about.”

Rufus nodded.

“I sorry, Mr Ladiv,” he said to Vidal. “It would seem that you have more passion and integrity than I have credited you for, and I apologise for that.”

“Thank you, Mr Remore,” Ladiv said. “I have been far more involved with the Adventure Society here than any of you. I can tell you that while there is more political influence than I would like, the Yaresh branch is not as far gone as you might fear. The director, from what I can tell, is a good man. He manoeuvred the Aristocratic faction into calling on the Continental Council, not realising how inured they are to the influence of local political forces. Only the proper adventurers in their faction opposed it, knowing the reality, but the director’s timing was deft. So, to answer your question, Mr Remore, the only people ‘calling for your heads’ who resisted calling in the Continental Council were the actual adventurers who understood what that entailed. Now that they have time to explain it to their fellows, they are trying to reverse that decision.”

“Will they be able to do that?” Rufus asked.

“There are no guarantees,” Vidal said, “but I suspect not. The Adventure Society director tricked the Aristocratic Faction into expending too much political capital. They pushed too hard for the executive council of the Adventure Society to go up against the director. They won’t get them to go up against the director a second time to undo the thing they were influenced into doing in the first place.”

"The Aristocratic faction members are nobility," Humphrey said. "Their rights are theirs by blood and can only be taken from them for transgressions on the level of treason. Any political setback for them is temporary."

Humphrey glanced at Jason before turning back to the group.

“The bureaucrats at the Adventure Society don’t have the same security in their positions,” he continued. “They will do what their political masters want, but only while it still benefits them. A nobleman can be seen taking wildly different positions from one day to the next because his family name will always place him on the upper echelon. Calcifer Bynes ran out of the large meeting we had all but wetting himself. He’ll pay a political price for that public humiliation but it doesn’t change the fact that he is and always will be a man of wealth, influence and power.”

“A good example,” Vidal said. “Calcifer Bynes is part of the executive council, and while he’ll fade into the background for a time, he’s not going anywhere. But the bulk of the group are career bureaucrats. They have suckled at the teat of larger political forces, but when their careers are in danger, they will act in their own interests. This is why they will almost certainly not revoke the call for Continental Council intercession.”

“That makes sense,” Rufus said. “Calling in the council and then telling them to go home before they arrived would have severe political repercussions.”

“What can we expect from this Continental Council?” Belinda asked.

“Last time I got involved with them,” Jason said, “they demoted me. Along with almost every adventurer in the city.”

“You hadn’t just let loose a cohort of enemies to attack adventurers, though,” Clive said regretfully. “I think I’ve earned us all worse than just demotion.”

Neil leaned forward in his chair to put a comforting hand on Clive’s shoulder.

“Don’t worry about it,” Neil said. “Everyone here agrees with you.”

“Yes,” Humphrey agreed. “We’ve just been talking about the things that negatively impact the Adventure Society. The way we fight back against that influence is by remaining independent. The way they’re meant to allow adventurers to be. If we had just capitulated, we would have been contributing to the problem.”

“Look at you, fighting authority,” Belinda told Humphrey. “You’re turning into Jason.”

Humphrey looked at her for a long moment, then took a plate from his storage space and held it out for her.

“Sandwich?” he asked in a deadpan voice and everyone but Vidal started laughing.

“This is a very weird team,” Vidal said.

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